Trevi Fountain fee and municipalities hungry for easy money

Councillor Alessandro Onorato’s idea to introduce a pay-as-you-go ticket (2 euros for half an hour) at the Trevi Fountain confirms for the umpteenth time how money-hungry Italian municipalities are becoming. Especially when this money is easy and comes from the pockets of tourists, who do not vote and therefore cannot then possibly make their dissent heard at election time. And the same municipal administrators are instead disinterested in solving a real problem, such as that of tourist overcrowding, in front of the Trevi Fountain as in other parts of Italy.

I tend to be in favor of experimenting with closed or calculated number modes to make a monument, museum or place usable and enjoyable. But I am, on the other hand, absolutely against any pay-as-you-go ticket. Because we have to be clear: a 2 or 5 euro ticket serves to make money for the coffers of a municipality, but it does not affect in the least the number of tourists who decide to enter a city (as was the case in Venice) or a monument. If I go to Rome, often once in a lifetime, and I want to see the Trevi Fountain, it is certainly not an economic problem to pay the ticket, just as it is not a problem to pay the tourist tax, however exaggerated it may be like the one in force in Rome.

The proposal appears operationally even more absurd when Councillor Onorato (who evidently chose this issue of tourist overcrowding to be on TV, newspapers and websites all the time) added how this system would operate. I will try to explain it well, because it is not simple: compulsory reservation with a 2 euro ticket and 30 minutes of time available, one compulsory entrance and one exit, controlled by stewards and hostesses, but - watch out! - the Trevi Fountain square will remain open and free of charge, while the reservation and ticket will be used only to enter the steps under the monument.

In other words, a cumbersome and very expensive system that will end up making the City of Rome spend more money than it could collect. The mountain that gives birth to the flea instead of the classic mouse. And - it must unfortunately always be repeated - without reducing by a single unit the number of people who will flock to a monument that never ceases to amaze and fascinate.

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